As traditional ways of meeting partners are closing off to ever increasing numbers of people, dating websites have sprung forth, providing pragmatic — and highly efficient — alternatives.

If ever lengthening working days are reducing opportunities for socialising and growing geographical mobility is cutting people off from family and social networks, chance encounters with friends of friends that might one day lead to romance become less likely.

But online dating is more than just a reaction against old trends. It is also an advance in its own right, offering the advantages of speed, anonymity, an enormous pool of “candidates” to choose from and — perhaps most important of all — the chance to turn someone down without having to look him in the eye.

As Richard Giordarno, who lectures on web-based social forms at Birkbeck College, University of London, says, electronic dating confers a degree of control over the environment that people just can never get from a face-to-face encounter.

“You can pick and choose the person you want to meet and you have control over the way you display yourself. It’s not unknown for people to post a picture of themselves that is ten years old,” he says.

For the generation raised on texting, instant messaging and e-mail as the main forms of non-face-to-face communication, the success of online dating is no mystery.

But what about their parents’ generation? “As people shop online and use the internet for other purposes, they begin to trust it more as an environment, even if they don’t believe everything they read on it,” Dr Giordarno says.

But does it work? Well, some researchers believe that romances sparked on the internet are more likely to succeed long-term than those that begin face-to-face because they allow couples to get to know each other before they meet up. Forget love at first sight . . . this is love at first byte.

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